“Ann Fabian’s latest book is fascinating, astonishingly original, and supplies significant implications for our understanding of life and death in America—among other things.  Brain capacity leads to issues of intelligence, and we all know where that leads. The subject is both curious and compelling—American studies and cultural history at its best.”

Michael Kammen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of People of Paradox

 “Ann Fabian’s The Skull Collectors has all the elements of great history: genuine surprises, originality, imaginative research, and marvelous storytelling. Even more importantly, it is a brilliant, disturbing story about the fateful convergence of science and racism in the nineteenth century. Samuel George Morton’s famous skulls, and the quest by so many others to find, steal, measure, and collect so many varieties of ‘heads’ tells us much about the roots of modern racism as well as about why ‘we’ still struggle to define ourselves as one species. Fabian shows us how the dead have always been our teachers, but what we learn depends on the questions we ask.”

David W. Blight, Yale author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory , and A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped from Slavery, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation

“A haunting voyage through the peculiar—and peculiarly American—world of human skull collecting. Ann Fabian’s remarkable and moving study illuminates as few other works have the powerful hold that the dead and their remains continue to have upon the living.”

Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History

“Fabian provides the reader a firm understanding of the history of American physical anthropology during the nineteenth century, serving as an excellent reminder of how far methodologies have come since then. . . . This volume is an excellent contribution to growing literature in the early physical anthropological praxis.”

American Indian Quarterly